Simon Adams wrote: ↑Fri May 21, 2021 11:07 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri May 21, 2021 8:57 pm
The "anti-naturalism" element he adds there is a result of ignoring the metamorphic progression of Spirit (yes I will continue to be a broken record about this
). It really lies at the heart of so many misunderstandings. For Plato, Aristotle, and even many thinkers up to the Scholastics, the "bottom-up" naturalist approach could not be conceived, let alone advocated. But we live in a different age now with different tools and a qualitatively different mode of consciousness. That is why BK and others can claim to be "naturalists" without ceding
any ground to physicalists. In fact, the 20th century has started to make clear that
physicalism is
not compatible with naturalism, such as we see in Hoffman's Darwinian models of perception, but also in many, many more thinkers over the last 150 years. Those are the conclusions... the arguments for them are in the metamorphic essays. Any metaphysical-spiritual worldview which cannot encompass modern science in its
essence (not its materialist-dualist methods and conclusions i.e. what you refer to as "reductionism" and "empiricism") should really be discarded from any serious consideration.
But ‘modern science’ will change completely in 200 years time, and again in another 200 years time. Each generation always thinks that it’s science is right on the edge of understanding the whole of reality, then a couple of centuries pass and we look back on them as close to fundamentally mistaken. Another part of the world with a different way of looking at things picks up the mantel, views ‘science’ with a culturally different metaphysical perspective, but also establishes that some things the generations before saw as fundamental was in fact just a certain appearance of things. Rinse and repeat. It’s a persistent illusion that we’ve anything more than a very primitive understanding of anything whatsoever, and generally people weren’t even imagining what the next Kuhn like revolution would be like, or even about.
The above is missing a critical aspect of the metamorphic progression - the later scientific paradigms
encompass and make sense of the earlier ones. It is not simply that the earlier theories in the old paradigm are declared fundamentally mistaken, but it is also specified
how and why they are mistaken and
why the corrective measures employed by the later theories successfully bridge the gap between the paradigms. We see that same pattern in philosophy just as in science, although it is not a strictly linear progression, and it only occurs when they are carried out properly, i.e. according to their
essential method.
At the same time, what you see as a forward evolution of the mode of consciousness, coming to nee heights in the 20th Century, from another perspective is going backwards in many ways. The culture of duty towards society is being replaced with the culture of self entitlement, the culture of sacrifice with one of immediate gratification, levels of depression rising year on year etc. I don’t see this as the whole picture as clearly our values and respect for human dignity has been developing slowly over many centuries, but the last century is evidence that we can more easily than ever be convinced by ‘logical’ ideas like eugenics and communism with disastrous consequences. Both of these were based on leading understandings of science and philosophy at the time.
We cannot anthropomorphize the metamorphic process in this way. The "forwardness" of the process is not about a 1:1 correspondence between progressive modes of consciousness and ethical values or integrated world outlooks. It is simply about observing the
actual development of the later forms out of the earlier forms, as any Darwinian scientist would. What this means for ethical development of values is of utmost importance, but an entirely new question that deserves much more attention. It gets that attention in Steiner's last chapters of
The PoF.
Simon wrote:In Isaiah there are some sections where he is told the words are sealed so they are for another time. Some are about a current event at the time, but as Pageau says are written as a pattern, and can apply more than once. Some of them like Isaiah 53 we now know what that is about, but some like this a few chapters before seems to be about a pattern that happens multiple times;
“These people come near to me with their mouth
and honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
Their worship of me
is based on merely human rules they have been taught.
14 Therefore once more I will astound these people
with wonder upon wonder;
the wisdom of the wise will perish,
the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish.”
15 Woe to those who go to great depths
to hide their plans from the Lord,
who do their work in darkness and think,
“Who sees us? Who will know?”
16 You turn things upside down,
as if the potter were thought to be like the clay!
Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it,
“You did not make me”?
Can the pot say to the potter,
“You know nothing”?
If the metamorphic implications of ethical development deserves a much more expansive treatment, then it is even more true of the implications for scripture (something else Steiner writes extensively about). Although I would say the above passage speaks very well to the issues we face in the wake of modernity - namely the flipping upside down of what used to be the common metamorphic wisdom of the ancients (up to and including Scholastics). Now we imagine a world frozen in time, where we have progressed in knowledge and wisdom as far as we can go, so we leave the rest of living development up to something external, whether it be the State (think Marx, who famously remarked he "
flipped Hegel on his head") or God. One is over-materialized and the other is over-spiritualized, but they are both only dealing with extremes rather than healthy balance.